USGIF GotGeoint BlogUSGIF promotes geospatial intelligence tradecraft and a stronger community of interest between government, industry, academia, professional organizations and individuals focused on the development and application of geospatial intelligence to address national security objectives.

January 22, 2010

After a three-month investigation by the European Commission, the EU has decided that the acquisition has the "potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products." Of particular concern was Oracle's acquisition of MySQL with reportedly 11 million installations.

By buying Sun, Oracle acquires the world's most widely-used open source database MySQL, which Sun bought in 2008. The Commission concluded that Oracle and MySQL dominate different database market segments. For example, Oracle dominates in the high end, where it competes with IBM and SQL Server and where MySQL has virtually no presence. The Commission also found that there are viable alternatives to MySQL, for example, PostgreSQL (which underlies PostGIS) and which is a more competitive open source alternative to Oracle's RDBMS than MySQL.

In the spatial market, Oracle Spatial and PostGIS are probably the leading spatial database engines, but many RDBMSs now support spatial data including MySQL, SQLServer 2008, Ingres, and several IBM RDBMSs.

January 29, 2009

The American Society for Civil Engineers just released their updated 2009 Report Card. The ASCE
issued report cards in 2003 and 2005. Since the last Report Card in 2005, the grades have not improved. US Infrastructure still gets a grade of D, but the estimated cost of upgrading it to an acceptable standard has now risen to $2.2 trillion, from $1.6 trillion in 2005. The ASCE looked at 15 types of infrastructure. Of these since 2005, aviation, public transit, and roads got worse and only one, energy, improved.

Roads, D-

Americans spending more than 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic.

February 27, 2008

Autodesk has developed and donated to the OSGEO an open source Feature Data Object (FDO) Provider for Microsoft SQL Server 2008. The SQL Server 2008 Data Provider allows access to the native spatial data
types and spatial indexing available in SQL Server 2008. When SQL Server 2008 is released, all of the major RDBMSs including Oracle, MySQL, PostGIS/PostgreSQL, Informix, and DB2 will support native spatial data types and spatial indexing. The new FDO data provider adds to the 17 existing FDO data providers, including the seven developed since FDO was donated to the open source community.

November 04, 2006

One of the most interesting talks I went to at Oracle Open World last week was a talk by Noel Yuhanna of Forrester on The Future of Database Technology: An Analyst's View.

Features and Technologies

First of all the features and technologies that he expects to become the focus of database vendors in
the immediate future are open source, consolidation, in-memory databases (caches), very large databases (apparently the largest one at the present is 50 TB), grid architecture, unstructured data, higher performance, increased availability, database security, and archiving and retention.

DBAs

An interesting fact is that apparently there are 265,000 DBA's around the world. An even more interesting statistic is that each DBA manages on average a terabyte of data. I validated this statistic myself chatting to a couple of folks who turned out to be DBAs. For example, I chatted with a very interesting person from the Liquor Licensing Board (LLB) of British Columbia, and he said that the LLB managed about 2.5 TB of data, and employed two senior DBAs and a junior consultant DBA. This is pretty close to the 2.5 DBAs you would expect for 2.5 TBs of data.

Over the next few years Noel expects that DBA's will spend a decreasing amount of time on tuning and performance, availability and disaster recovery, because these areas are being increasingly automated. RDBMSs are becoming increasingly adaptive, so they they can diagnose and solve their own problems and tune themselves. This means that instead of spending their time on administration and tuning they will spend an increasing proportion of their time on security, performance, and functionality.

By 2012 DBAs will be spending a lot of their time on architecture and implementation to support database virtualization.

Database Virtualization

Noel outlined a very general architecture for database virtualization that includes a cache layer (for
performance), a database management layer (for backup/recovery, transaction management, and other administration tasks), and the data layer itself. To me this is a very general data management architecture that has been proven over and over again for OLTP (online transaction processing) applications and it appears to be evolving into the de facto architecture for database virtualization.